Oasis helps cut surgery waits in Surrey

The Royal Surrey County Hospital in Guildford says its 12 operating theatre suites are now running at over 90 per cent available capacity, after the successful implementation of a Capula Healthcare system.

The 90 per cent figure has been achieved by a combination of the accuracy of the data on its Oasis patient administration system and its seamless integration with the operating theatre element of the Oasis suite. This has helped the hospital to improve its performance and cut waiting times for elective surgery.

Royal Surrey County started using the operating theatre element of Capula’s Oasis software in October last year and rolled it out specialty-by-specialty. The screen displays occupancy for all seven days in the week and staff can click on any individual session on any given day to view all occupancy details, making it easy to see where there are vacant slots among its operating theatres.

A Royal Surrey County spokesperson said: “The functionality includes flexibility which allows staff to manage the need to make changes to theatre lists. This includes the order of the patients, booking of emergencies, changing the location of the list and changing the ownership.”

When a vacant slot is available, staff are alerted to the availability and can identify patients with an appropriate need who can come in at short notice to fill the gap, or search the PAS to see how long patients have been waiting for treatment, based on information in patient notes.

Royal Surrey County’s critical care and anaesthetics manager, Robin Jago added: “When we enter data into the waiting list we can tick a box that indicates that the patient can come in quickly, we also record all available mobile phone numbers.

“This ensures, as much as possible. That we receive a swift response to any offer of an earlier appointment. As a result, we rarely fail to fill a vacant slot, and this has helped us to reduce our overall waiting times.”

A Capula spokesperson said: “Oasis supports better patient care through the rapid communication of information, the ability to set standard protocols and procedures, reduce the resource and time wasted on paper chasing and provides the professional tools to allow users to be more efficient and effective.

“Oasis provides all the functionality for the management of day surgery clinics, wards and theatres. Oasis supplies the user with the facilities to quickly plan and book patient appointments for multiple resources on a single screen. This screen provides an effective and efficient approach to recognising bottlenecks or spare capacity within the day surgery process.”

Oasis was developed in the UK with substantial input from NHS clinical and administrative staff input, to meet the specific needs of the NHS. It has been accredited for Choose and Book.